The archive, the collection and the hunter: autobiography of a historical ethnography

Abstract

In this article I propose an autobiographical reflection on the practice and the method of ethnography in/of the archive. Using the metaphor of hunting, I argue this mode of research situated at the crossroads of the anthropology and history disciplines can be approached as a kind of semiotic hunt. That is: as an investigative work oriented to pursuing and interpreting traces, trails, clues – sometimes fragmentary and broken; embodied in different materialities – that read as signs of events that really happened in the past. In the research practice here examined – the historical ethnography of a colonial collection of human skulls from East Timor now held by the Coimbra University Museum of Science – the semiotic hunt concerned a dynamic trail of archival traces, which ultimately revealed a past of colonial violence.